Free Bilingual Being by Kathleen Saint-Onge

just said. “Here we talk like this”: he then gave a sample utterance in Turkish of about the same length, perhaps a direct translation.
    In other words, this was not the right place, or person, to be speaking English to, he was kindly explaining. As he properly understood it, this was a home, an occasion, and a listener for which I should have been speaking in Turkish. Trouble was, while his mum was doing her best to learn my language, I was entirely failing at learning hers. Shewas seeking to acquire my tongue, presumably for better economic opportunities for the next generation of her family. But I was actually seeking the opportunity to hide inside hers, to not learn it so that I could let its prosody alone be my safe shelter, a songlike sea of voices where I was, and was not, addressed. Where I could be both present and absent, engaging and withdrawing at once.
    I didn’t say all that, of course. I just looked at him in amazement. For he’d crossed a bit of a breach himself, bringing linguistic theory right into my face over baklava and chai. “You’re right,” I said to him. “I should be speaking Turkish to your mother, but I don’t know Turkish. Your mother’s English is getting pretty good, so we’re speaking English to each other.”
    â€œOh,” he replied, pensively. A bit more silence, then a smile. “Well, you should learn it. It’s easy.” He made his request to his mother, in Turkish, and skipped away to get his drink from the refrigerator. And why wouldn’t he see it that way? After all, he was fluently bilingual, years before and more perfectly than his parents would ever be. It was just one more symbolic snapshot of how easily children play in linguistic fields and then run quickly beyond view.
    While his mother had been a bit embarrassed at his rudeness, his interruption, I frankly thought he was a genius. In fact, though, he was a fairly typical immigrant child. Using expert English acquired from six months of pre-school television programs and community daycare – while his newly arrived parents struggled in LINC classes * as they tried to recertify their professional credentials – he’d figured out that language is a system deeply connected to context.
    He’d understood that there’s such a thing as a mother tongue: that’s what you speak to parents. That there are places where you speak only the mother tongue because outside tongues belong, well, outside. And that you can switch between these different communicative systems as a straightforward choice, each having its own meaning and purpose. Not even five himself, and before even entering the school system, heunderstood that language demarcates space and time, self and other, inner world and outer world. That language divides.
    UNE P’TITE RÉVOLUTION
    I’ve always believed so strongly that language can break a family apart that I’d trust my own children to no language other than the one they were born into: English. The father of all three is an Anglo-Canadian originally from the Toronto area. We met in Manitoba and throughout our married life lived on the West Coast as best friends and isolates. Sufficiently distant from my francophone roots that it was easy to accomplish an English focus from the start, I taught myself English lullabies and songs to expose my children to literacy in ways I’d never known. The growing collection of My Old Bookhouse was pressed into use, as were recycled English picture books, courtesy of the discard sales.
    I endeavoured in every way to give my children the childhood I never had: a conservative, child-centred world of play dates, parks, and storybooks. And while it can be argued that childhood is necessarily an imagined community – a play-driven place where the currency is games, sleep, snacks, and fictional characters – my children’s world became my own imagined ideal, a reliving of youth as